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The latest piece of news on MOOCs — massive online open courses — suggests that they may not yet be the great democratizer of education that they were envisioned to be.

One of the driving ideas behind MOOCs is that they are accessible to everyone, everywhere, regardless of previous educational achievement, socioeconomic status, or physical location. A teenager in rural Montana, a construction worker in Atlanta, and a grandmother in India can take the same courses from the same professors as a Harvard student in Cambridge — for free.

But a new article in Science by Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral candidate John Hansen, Ed.M.’15, and MIT research scientist Justin Reich, Ed.D.’12, shows that, generally, MOOCs have not reached such a demographically broad audience.

Studying 164,198 participants in 68 MOOCs offered by Harvard and MIT through edX, Hansen and Reich’s research reinforces other findings that the average MOOC participant looks a lot like the average U.S. college graduate. Paying particular attention to high-school and college-age participants, Hansen and Reich found that the majority of MOOC participants lived in more affluent and educated neighborhoods than the average U.S. resident. And the majority of participants —

The push for STEM initiatives — coding workshops for elementary school children, or extended-day science experiments for middle school students — reigns at the forefront of the education conversation today. But anyone in the classroom knows that science can be a tough subject to teach, with educators at times overwhelmed with the amount of material to cover, and students simultaneously discouraged with the amount to master.

As STEM enthusiasm percolates, the teaching of science — its importance, its challenges — isn’t always part of the conversation. Usable Knowledge spoke with two Harvard faculty members, one an experienced high school teacher and the other a philosopher of science, whose thoughts may help to reframe and revitalize the mission of science education. Both argue that science should be much more than the rote memorization of theories, formulas, and vocabulary. It should be an education in problem solving and collaboration.

Science as Skill Building

HGSE Lecturer Victor Pereira, who taught high school science for more than a decade before becoming the master teacher in residence (science) in the new Harvard Teacher Fellows Program, knows the challenges firsthand. Classes can vary hugely in terms of students’ prior

For HGSE Professor Chris Dede, the rise of data science in education research is a potentially transformative development in our understanding of how people learn — and how best to teach them.

Dede compares what’s happening now with data-intensive research in education to the inventions of the microscope and the telescope. “Both of these devices revealed new types of data that were always present, but never before accessible,” he says. “We now have the equivalent of the microscope and the telescope for understanding learning, teaching, and schooling in powerful ways. What was previously invisible can now be studied and shaped.”

In a significant new report compiled and edited for the Computing Research Association (CRA), Dede shows that — just as science and engineering have used technology-enriched, data-intensive research to probe fundamental questions — education is primed to grapple with its own driving questions. The STEM fields, replete with examples of successful research strategies, can stand as a model for how education can do it — and how federal support could help.

In the report, Data-Intensive Research in Education: Current Work and Next Steps [PDF], Dede summarizes case studies presented earlier this year at

Most of the skills we need to do our jobs — the ability to complete tasks, collaborate with colleagues, circumvent obstacles, and plan for future assignments — are skills we learn at work, not before. But when employees learn by doing, they don’t always recognize when and how the learning is happening — and likewise do not consider the best ways to optimize their learning as they carry out tasks.

Researchers at the Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA), an initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, are investigating how to make on-the-job learning a richer experience. Considering a variety of professional contexts, HGSE Professor David Perkins; Michele Rigolizzo, Ed.M.’10; and Marga Biller, Ed.M.’81, explore how employees can approach different tasks to achieve quality results and fuel future learning. Their research suggests that there are three stances, or mindsets, that people adopt when approaching a task at work: completion, performance, and development.

In the completion stance, employees aim to get a task done well, but with little time or mental investment. Think of filling out a timesheet; although there may be an easier way to do it, it just has

Language and literacy expert Catherine Snow has one piece of advice for principals, superintendents, policymakers, and every aspiring educator: It all comes down to reading.

“Every other initiative that leaders might undertake is less important than making sure that the students in the schools learn how to read,” she says. But a school devoted to literacy ought to envision more than just sustained, quiet, independent reading, suggests Snow, who leads an intensive mini-course this month at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on what education leaders need to know about how kids learn to read. In a conversation with Usable Knowledge, Snow outlined several of these basic principles — and the common thread running through them.

Start by Talking to Build Knowledge

“Your skills as a reader are a product of all of the accumulated knowledge of your lifetime,” explains Snow. Much of a student’s reading comprehension derives from the amount of prior knowledge — vocabulary as well as facts — he can use to define and contextualize what he’s reading. Even with very young students, schools must emphasize knowledge building as much as they emphasize skills.

As 2015 draws to a close, we hope for a new year where cooperation and empathy supersede violence and suspicion. For our final article this year, Usable Knowledge asks: Can education foster a more peaceful world?

According to Silvia Diazgranados Ferráns, an instructor and doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, it can. Her research on peace education reveals a complex field that seeks to help schools build communities that foster peacemaking and citizenship — to encourage students to become empathetic, inclusive, critical thinkers who have the skills to live peaceful lives.

The Goals of Peace Education

The goals of peace education vary widely across the world. In developing countries, where there is no specific enemy or conflict but a general lack of human rights, peace education seeks to elucidate sources of inequality to promote a more equitable, stable future. In areas of intractable conflict between specific groups, as in Israel and the Palestinian territories, peace education seeks to promote alternate narratives of the conflict to encourage mutual understanding, respect, and collaboration.

In areas where there is no active conflict or violation of human rights, peace education seeks to promote individual skills that reject

Every teacher wants to see her students improve. But measuring that improvement may be more difficult than it seems. Over the past 15 years, No Child Left Behind and other federal policies have given special prominence to one primary measure for assessing student progress: the so-called percent proficient measure. With this metric, educators can track the percentage of students in a class, school, or district who are “proficient” (scoring at or above a certain designated baseline), with hopes that this percentage will eventually rise to 100.

But HGSE Professor Andrew Ho has a warning for the teachers, administrators, and policymakers who rely on this measure. Looking at these percentages is like “viewing progress through a funhouse mirror,” Ho cautions. “If educators and policymakers have questions about growth and equity, their answers will be at best distorted and at worst just wrong.”

Fixing the Funhouse Mirror

Ho’s research has found three main problems with assessing students by “percent proficient.”

Arbitrary markers

First, he says, “these initial proficiency markers are arbitrary, determined by an overwrought, judgmental, and ultimately political process.”

The animation above illustrates the point. If we imagine the usual “bell curve” of students, some states can set a

Hand-wringing about young people’s participation in politics and civic life is common, particularly in an election season. But civics scholar Helen Haste, a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, isn’t seeing things quite so bleakly.

Usable Knowledge sat down with Haste to talk about new forms of civic participation, a new lens on democracy, and a new brand of civic education. What follows is an excerpt from that conversation.

How is the notion of civic participation changing?

We’re seeing an explosion of different ways of thinking about civic participation amongst everybody, but particularly amongst the young. And this is changing how we think about politics, it’s changing how we think about democracy. It’s certainly changing how we define participation in the civic domain. And it has enormous implications for education, because if we’re thinking differently about what a good citizen is, an effective citizen, then we obviously have to think differently about how we produce them. This is being called the “new civics.”

This partly arose because of a sort of moral panic in the last few years in a number of countries that young people aren’t voting. Young people aren’t voting

We’ve all seen it happen to a child confronting long division, or a teenager grappling with geometry. We’ve even done it ourselves. The frustrated pencil drop, the defeated shoulder slump, and finally, the resigned proclamation: “I just can’t get this. I’m not a math person.”

But what does being a “math person” really mean? And more important, how can teachers help every student feel prepared and excited to tackle new concepts in mathematics?

According to HGSE Lecturer Noah Heller, the idea that there are “math people” and “not math people” is a social construct and not based on inherent characteristics. It stems from the belief that math intelligence is a fixed trait, rather than something that grows and develops with hard work and opportunities to learn. But the notion of a “math person” is still a useful one for math teachers to consider when trying to develop lessons and classroom norms that foster perseverance in all students.

Forced into Mathematics

When students proclaim that they’re “not ‘math persons,’ that’s an indication that they feel outside of mathematics, that math doesn’t belong to them,” explains Heller, the master teacher in residence for mathematics at the Harvard Teachers

The legend of the superhero teacher who steps into a crumbling, underresourced school and singlehandedly changes the lives of a group of indifferent or hostile students is a pervasive one in popular culture. But actual teachers at work in high-poverty schools know that individual effort and passion are rarely enough to ensure student success, superpowers or not. According to a new report, these teachers — while remarkably motivated by the challenge at hand — need and want school-wide, institutionalized supports in order to succeed in the face of the uncertainties that poverty brings. Schools that hope to retain these teachers and bolster their success must provide those supports, the report concludes.

A research team led by Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Susan Moore Johnson at the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers spoke to 95 teachers and administrators in six high-poverty, high-minority schools in a large, urban district. Researchers including Matthew Kraft and John Papay, both of Brown University, analyzed the data to study the effect of uncertainty — the instability that often disrupts their students’ lives and impedes their performance — on teachers’ work and career decisions. They wanted to look

This post is republished (in slightly edited form) from Into Practice, a biweekly communication sent from Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning to Harvard. Into Practice offers evidence-based teaching advice and shares the pedagogical practices of faculty from across Harvard. It grew out of a successful 2012 grant project led by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Nonie K. Lesaux and Matthew Miller that aimed to create a new model for engaging and supporting doctoral students in their professional development as educators.

Katherine Merseth, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, creates a culture of reciprocity in her classroom, where students and instructors alike are expected to both teach and learn. “The two words are often interchanged because they are inextricably linked — learners need teachers, and teachers need learners,” Merseth says.

The benefits: Though seemingly contradictory, sharing responsibility for teaching and learning enhances instructor influence. In her popular undergraduate course, Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education (see video trailer), Merseth encourages students to lead the discussion, promoting new perspective and understanding. “When I teach, I get back more than I put out, because I acknowledge this relationship

Can a state’s takeover of an entire school district improve student achievement? Can that improvement be sustainable? And most important, can that takeover model be applied in other districts?

In 2012, after years of worsening test scores and abysmal graduation rates, the Lawrence Public Schools system was taken over by the state of Massachusetts — and the answer to all three of those questions later turned out to be “yes.”

“Lawrence is a rare example of a district-wide turnaround effort that has led to some positive results,” says Beth Schueler, a Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral student who has analyzed the Lawrence takeover in detail. “I think it’s an exciting proof point, because the examples of positive turnaround efforts are so few and far between.”

Schueler and her coauthors, HGSE Associate Professor David Deming and Harvard Kennedy School Associate Professor Joshua Goodman, describe the success of the Lawrence project in a new working paper that may serve as a blueprint for other districts and states. In a conversation recorded for the Harvard EdCast, Schueler and Deming discussed the lessons of the Lawrence takeover.

By extending learning time, concentrating on school leadership, and giving many schools

Imagine being afraid to rummage in your backpack on a crowded bus, or worrying about how to explain your holidays to your classmates, or wondering if your friends are whispering about your head scarf — and then imagine trying to keep your focus on your schoolwork.

These anxieties, and many more, are all too real for many Muslim American students, explains Taymullah Abdur-Rahman, the Harvard Chaplain for the Harvard Islamic Society. As political leaders grapple with how to handle the threat that ISIS and other terror groups pose to the United States, Muslim American children, teenagers, and young adults are left to contend with that confusion and fear in their everyday lives.

Educators, always working to create inclusive spaces, can serve as important allies in encouraging empathy and modeling support for Muslim young people — and the peers of those Muslim students can do the same.

How to Build an Inclusive Community

Students of any appearance and any background can identify as Muslim, says Abdur-Rahman, so educators should “just assume there’s always a Muslim in the room.” The challenges Muslim students face may not be apparent to their teachers and friends, however. They might have a

If you ask any college instructor or high school English teacher which part of her job is the most time-consuming, says Nancy Sommers, you’ll hear the same answer across the board: “Responding to my students’ writing.” “Reading my students’ writing.” “Grading my students’ writing.”

“Responding to students’ writing takes more time, thought, and energy than any other aspect of teaching,” says Sommers, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the former director of Harvard’s Expository Writing Program, and the founder of the Harvard Writing Project. Sommers has been researching teacher response to writing for decades. “If teaching involves leaps of faith,” she says, “responding is one of the greatest leaps because we have so little direct evidence of what students actually do with our comments, of why they find some useful and others not.”

Her key advice? A teacher’s response to a student’s work can play a leading role in the student’s development as a writer — but to leverage that potential, a teacher needs to understand where and how much to comment, and how to engage the student in the feedback process.

It’s no secret that school districts face continual financial pressures. But among the many roadblocks to securing increased funding is the challenge of candidly communicating such a need with voters. A new study sheds light on just how complicated this can be.

Misjudging Budgets

In a new paper, education policy expert Martin West and advanced doctoral student Beth Schueler, both of Harvard Graduate School of Education, reveal that Americans tend to vastly underestimate the average salary of a public school teacher in their state. They also underestimate the amount their local school district spends per pupil. And when provided with the actual numbers on salaries and spending, the researchers say, Americans experience “sticker shock” — and become much less likely to support an increase in government funding for public schools.

The Research

Using data from a 2012 Education Next survey of 2,993 respondents who are nationally representative, West and Schueler found that the more someone unknowingly underestimated public school budgets, the more likely she was to support an increase in funding.

In the study, respondents were first asked to guess the average amount of money spent per child in their school district and the average salary of

As presidential candidates trade views on immigration, foreign policy, health care, and a multitude of other issues, one essential element of American life seems to be missing from the conversation: K-12 education.

To find out why, and to dig deeper into the dynamics of election-year politics, Usable Knowledge sat down with policy analyst Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

Why haven’t the presidential candidates been talking about K-12 education?

Education as a central issue in national-level politics in the United States is the exception rather than the rule. Many people have strong memories of 2000, when education was foremost in voters’ minds, but that hasn’t been the case since that time, and really wasn’t the case before that time.

This reflects the fact that the United States has a strong tradition of state and local control when it comes to K-12 education, and that has very deep roots. Especially right now, I also think there’s a bit of reform fatigue when it comes to the federal role in education, and there are questions in a lot of people’s minds about what the federal government can

While 21st-century pedagogy puts group projects and collaborative learning at center stage for students, these cooperative habits have not yet assumed such a prominent role for teachers. But collaboration among teachers — and a desire for that teamwork — is growing, with positive repercussions across schools.

A new paper by Susan Moore Johnson, Stefanie K. Reinhorn, and Nicole S. Simon from the Harvard Graduate School of Education examines when and how this collaboration works best.

What Makes an Effective Team

The researchers, members of The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, looked at teacher teams at three public and three charter Massachusetts schools located within the same city. All of the schools have a record of successfully serving high-poverty populations. In five of the six schools, teachers met with assigned teams on a regular basis (in the sixth school, teachers were strongly encouraged to collaborate but not assigned to teams). The researchers identified two types of teams: content teams, in which teachers focused on curriculum, lessons, and pedagogy; and cohort teams, in which teachers discussed behavior, individual student needs, and school culture.

Regardless of structure, teachers across the schools praised their teams, reporting that “working

We know that serious stress experienced early in life can have severe consequences on children’s biological development and executive function. Now, a new paper from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University is showing that the same stressors that hinder children’s development can have lasting consequences for adults, preventing them from developing and using the “core capabilities” they need to succeed at work, as parents, and in their communities.

What are these core capabilities? According to the report, they include planning and prioritizing, focus, self-control, awareness, and mentalflexibility — all characteristics of self-regulation, our ability to manage our responses to the world. The executive function skills that underpin these essential capacities are built in early childhood and develop through adolescence and early adulthood, as the brain grows and changes.

Chaotic, stressful, and threatening situations can derail anyone. But lifelong poverty and adversity make it especially difficult to build the skills people need to manage life’s challenges.

When people experience adversity early in life, brain regions used in threatening situations tend to over-develop. This pattern can heighten “fight or flight” responses and diminish the ability to assess a situation accurately and respond intentionally.

If educators want to develop critical, creative thinkers who can set and accomplish their own goals — and who can use those skills to strengthen their math and reading skills — they may want to take another look inside the music room.

For a child to play an instrument, she needs to stick to her goals, pay sustained attention, and be flexible enough to switch back and forth between tempos and styles. These habits draw heavily on executive function (EF) skills, cognitive processes that include problem-solving, goal setting, and flexible thinking. A number of studies have found that EF skills contribute hugely to students’ success in math and reading.

But music doesn’t just require EF skills; it may be a pathway to building them. That’s according to findings by developmental psychologist Nadine Gaab, whose work shows that people who play a musical instrument regularly have higher executive function skills than non-musicians — a significant finding for educators.

The Research

In a 2014 study, Gaab and her research team, including Jennifer Zuk, Ed.M.’10; Christopher Benjamin; and Arnold Kenyon, examined 30 adults between 18 and 35, and 27 children between 9 and 12. Half the participants were “musical”:

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